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Famous Investors, Economists & the DJIA

Famous Investors, Economists &the Dow Jones IA

Michael Batnick analyzed the birth dates of the most important investors of all time. Without further ado, the most important investors of all time (up to the maximum birth year of 1941) are stated in following Dow Jones-Chart:

But this is an incomplete list. It does not include any early financiers like J.P. Morgan, no chief strategists like Abby Joseph Cohen, and no Fed chairman like Alan Greenspan.

What the list does include is traders, investors, hedge fund managers, Nobel laureates, economists, and early pioneers of portfolio management. Some of these people never managed money, but had a huge influence on how we think about investing, like Daniel Kahneman or Robert Shiller, for example (who were born AFTER 1941, therefore not stated in the chart above).

Interesting facts:

The average 25-year total return (from the year 1900 - 2015) on the S&P 500 SPX was 1,463%! I'm not suggesting these people had it easy or that they were merely lucky, but they did have some nice tailwind!

♦ This is just a random observation. Granted a 25-year start/end date only exists in a spreadsheet but what a difference a year makes. The 25 years from 1966-1990 had a total return of 837%. If you start one year later, the 25-year total return jumps to 1,123%. (Personally recalculated with https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator ).

♦ The only decade to start at the lows and finish at the highs was the 1950s. Some of the investors that fortuitously began their career then were Jack Bogle, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Julian Robertson, Ed Thorp, William O'Neil, and Carl Icahn.